Articles

The myth of color blindness: Cultural biases are embedded in us unawares

By Cynthia Tucker
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jan. 20, 2008

After a recent column describing Barack Obama as "a presidential candidate who happens to be black — not a black presidential candidate," I received countless responses from readers, a handful of them odd. That odd handful declared they take no notice of superficial traits such as skin color, and they took me to task for making any reference to Obama's race.

"I thought of [Obama] as a person. I did not see black or white or Hispanic or that he was a man — I saw a person! If people really, truly want racial equality — then the first step has to be to STOP looking at skin color," wrote one reader.

"When I look at a person, the last thing I think about is skin color or heritage," wrote another.

Sorry, but I'm not buying it. While I am sympathetic to any desire to get past dated and useless habits of mind — especially the contentious politics of the color line — that's just nonsense. Not one of us, black, white or brown, is colorblind.

Those readers may think they don't notice skin color, but it's just not so, says University of Washington psychology professor Anthony Greenwald, an expert on implicit biases and common stereotypes. "Even if they can't see anything out of their eyes, they're not colorblind."

That's not a condemnation, not a presumption of malicious bigotry. It's just an acknowledgment of the peculiar burdens of humanity, especially in these United States. Assumptions about race and ethnicity are so deeply embedded in our culture that we can hardly help noticing skin color.

Some evolutionary psychologists believe humans are hard-wired to distrust the stranger, or "other" — a holdover from primitive man's tribal allegiances. But Greenwald believes the biases that he sees are of much more recent origin, the product of American cultural influences.

"Blacks don't show the same automatic preference for blacks that whites show for whites" in Greenwald's Implicit Association Test, which uses word association to detect unconscious bias.

Each of us is stuck with prejudices, and I'm using the denotative meaning here — "an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason," according to Webster's. But we don't have to be governed by them.

Cutting-edge work by Greenwald and his colleagues suggests there may be a way that people can learn to put aside their biases to make rational, fact-based judgments. "To the extent that we can influence what we learn and believe, we can influence less conscious states of mind," says Harvard University's Mahzarin Banaji.

But the first step is to own up to the problem. Many people don't know they're prejudiced because, well, they really don't know they're prejudiced. That self-knowledge is not necessarily difficult to acquire, but it's quite often hard to stomach.

Racial bigotry is a social taboo in this country, so much so that only an extremist fringe — assorted neo-Nazis and skinheads — admits its rank prejudices. That may explain why some volunteers who have taken Greenwald's Implicit Association Test are furious when the test shows they hold hidden negative views of black Americans.

"Some people have a concept of themselves as nonprejudiced, so anything indicating a chink in that armor is threatening," Greenwald said. But his research has also pointed out that most people simply aren't aware of their implicit assumptions.

Take the current Democratic primary. Greenwald and colleagues modified the Implicit Association Test to search for unconscious biases among Democratic voters. When asked who they planned to cast ballots for, a sample of voters reported strong support for Obama, who held a 42 percent to 34 percent lead over Hillary Clinton among the sample, with John Edwards coming in at 12. But when the same people took the Implicit Association Test, measuring their unconscious preferences, Clinton was "the runaway winner," favored by 48 percent of them, and Obama was dead last, with 25 percent. Edwards was favored by 27 percent, according to the researchers.

And here's one finding that fits Greenwald's research on American cultural biases: According to the test, black voters, too, held implicit biases that worked against Obama. Black Americans are products of the same culture, with its myriad stereotypes of black incompetence, as white Americans. And black Americans have internalized many of the same stereotypes.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a day when his children would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." But that day has not yet arrived. We might hasten its dawning if we'd admit that what we see is not necessarily what we believe.

Copyright 2008 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Source: http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/
tucker/stories/2008/01/18/tucked_0120.html

To make a comment on the Faith And The City weblog, click here.

Fair Use Notice

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

For more information, visit: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.